Apparently, completely revamping my website wasn't enough punishment for one week. I decided I'd also set up a new desktop machine.

My old desktop (fergus.mystery.com) has several purposes within the mystery.com network; it's not just for reading my e-mail. It monitors other machines, handles various inter-machine tasks, hosts a few websites ... it doesn't just sit there. This is significant, since I want to make it clear that I didn't take this step lightly. The old machine was slightly unreliable; if there was a power glitch, it usually wouldn't reboot cleanly and would require a full shutdown followed by a cold boot. Yes, a UPS should have made such glitches a non-issue, but my desktop UPS has a bad battery and is actually causing its own power glitches. (A replacement battery has been ordered.)

Meanwhile, it dawned on me that any time Audrey and I go out of town we may have a serious problem. If fergus hangs while we're away, we'd have to call a friend and beg them to go to the house and manually reset the machine. We don't like inconveniencing our friends, so I set about to inconvenience me instead. This took the form of setting up the new machine and transferring the critical services from the old machine to the new one.

I'm in the midst of it and expect to remain so for several days. Most of the services don't depend on being on any particular machine, so they're still running on the old box. I think the machine-dependent services are all now on the new machine. (This includes the gabe.helou.org website, which isn't important to anyone except me, I suspect.)

Since the new machine is a different size and shape from the old one, I've had to un-cable all of the computer equipment on my desk, rearrange it, then cable it back up again. Tedious and awkward, but my desk is momentarily tidier, so I declare it to be a good thing, over all.